


Search and Rescue

by AlyssOfSpades



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gaslighting, Manipulation, Murder, but they are good to each other, tldr our statement givers are not good people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 05:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21221333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlyssOfSpades/pseuds/AlyssOfSpades
Summary: Statement of Ashton Ableson, recounting a friendship with one Jamie Gates.An avatar of the spiral meets an avatar of the slaughter.





	Search and Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klatukatt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klatukatt/gifts).

_“Statement of Ashton Abelson, recounting a friendship with one Jamie Gates. Statement written in January of two thousand eighteen and received by the Institute on March third, two thousand nineteen. Statement begins.”_

I don’t know what your Archive is or how many statements of yours are actually true or if you’ve ever heard a story like mine, and honestly I couldn’t care less. All I know is that I overheard a conversation about your Institute and how you want people to tell you about weird things. Maybe someone’s told you about Jamie.

That’s my price, by the way, for giving you my statement. This is all very personal and I wouldn’t be telling it for nothing. If you have any information on Jamie Gates send it to me. You have to at this point, if you’re reading this letter you have to send me something. A statement for a statement, that sounds fair, right? I just need to know if she’s okay, or how I can help her. Please. At this point I can’t live without her.

I’m not going to try and win you over by saying that I’m a good person or whatever. I know I’m not. Maybe before all of this started I was. I volunteered with search and rescue up in Cairngorm, after all, so I couldn’t have been a terrible person. I dunno. It’s hard to pin down characteristics of myself these days. Still, I feel like I didn’t do it because of a bleeding heart or from having excess empathy for others, but because I liked being outside. S&R gave me free resources to do hiking. If my team and I found who we were looking for, that was great. If we didn’t, I still got to have a weekend out in the woods.

I can’t imagine that I would’ve stuck with S&R very long if I hadn’t found my niche. There’s a lot of stress to it, a lot of yelling for the person you’re looking for, which breaks the tranquility of being in the forest in the first place. What really hooked me was finding the person. Not the euphoric feeling others describe when they talk about saving a life, or the one they talk about when the lost person showers them with gratitude. I mean the expression on their face when you find them freshly confused. Their jaw slack, their eyes glazed over, how they wobble and grasp for branches that aren’t there because they’re so dehydrated. They’ve been so alone and so lost for so long that they don’t entirely believe you’re there. Sometimes you call for them and they don’t even turn around because they’re so convinced they’ll never be rescued, could never be rescued.

At first I thought that I was just entranced by a part of humanity that I’d never seen before. I kept signing up for more days with the team thinking I’d discovered a new passion in helping others. But the more S&R missions I went on, the more I realized I was doing it to get that reaction from people. Now, instead of being the one most unaffected if we were unable to find someone, I was the most frustrated. I’d be in a huff for days afterwards, slamming cabinets and snapping at my coworkers. I wasn’t happy if we found them immediately, either. That was the strange part. If we received a report of a missing person and we managed to find them within a couple hours, I was bored. They didn’t have that lost, bewildered expression if they hadn’t been missing long enough. I’d only get excited about a mission if they’d been gone for at least a few days, and my frustration would only kick in once the search was called off, not as the odds of success ticked down.

By the time I realized I stuck around for the pleasure of seeing others’ terror, I’d stopped caring. It’d been almost a year of working with S&R by that point, using all of my days off to work every mission that seemed worth my time. I was hooked. I don’t know how else to describe it. I needed more of those expressions, more time with those people. I couldn’t get that while in a group, having other people watching me and judging me for my actions.

You’re not supposed to go off by yourself during search and rescue. It makes you a liability. If you also get lost, then the team’s work is doubled. However, management has a lot to do, and after enough begging and pestering they agreed to look the other way if I wandered off. I guess I was just too much of a hassle to fuss with. It suited me just fine, whatever the reason. I got to go looking for people whenever I pleased.

So I did. I broke off when I found someone worth my time. It’s hard to describe how I chose people. Somehow I just knew. A gut feeling, if you will. I honestly did try to find them at first and return them immediately, but this turned out to be counterintuitive to my goal. I already mentioned how people who aren’t out there long enough aren’t properly freaked out to give me any satisfaction. I’m good at S&R. I found people, especially when I had such motivation. But I felt cheated when I found them and got nothing out of it.

I started leaving them out there longer. A lot longer. I located a trace of them a few days in, then begin to, interfere, one could say. This pattern lasted for a few weeks, if that, before I needed more still. It got to the point where it was just me out in the forest looking for people, no team to back me up, which was super illegal. When I did this I wore a wig, color contacts, platform shoes, make-up to change the contours of my face, the works. They’d see me later with the rescue team, at least a glimpse of me, and I didn’t want to be identified as the one who was harassing them.

The average encounter would go something like this. I’d bump into them, pretending I didn’t know they were lost. They’d give me their lackluster, teary-eyed thanks and ask me to lead them home. I’d oblige. Fortunately for them, I knew a shortcut. We’d be back in no time. We walked together as I cheerfully talked about the various survival techniques I knew and the various flora and fauna around us. Anything to make them at ease with me initially.

My “shortcuts” always took days more than it should. I was always just as confused as they were. We wouldn’t sleep, as I urged them fervently to press on. Once they were good and sleep deprived, I’d tell them we’d rested just a short while ago and couldn’t afford to lose any more time.

Sometimes, while I was doing this, it felt like the forest would shift around us. There were points where we heard wolves in the distance. Wolves haven’t existed in England for centuries, and yet we heard them, clear as the moonlight filtering in from the canopy. My charge would cry out, and I’d ask them what was wrong, as if I hadn’t heard anything. Sometimes the trees would be too tall, or it’d get cold and start to snow in the middle of July. I’d look around, eyes wide, and wonder aloud about how long we’d been walking, mirroring the shell-shocked look in their face. These impossible things never really frightened me. In fact, I delighted in them. While in the midsts of it, reveling in it, I was always certain that they were happening because of and for me, and I was ever so thrilled.

My new friend, however, would always be reaching about the peak of their terror when things were visually wrong and I was confirming it. At this point I’d leave, slowly. They’d have a few close calls losing sight of me, finding me again within five minutes to five hours. There would always be a river of tears to soothe, no matter how long I’d left them. By the third or fourth time, I’d actually leave. A few days after this, an anonymous tip would ever so gently nudge the search party to the correct location. The missing required psychiatric help by that point. I’m very sure that none of them ever really got over their experience. It still brings me some satisfaction.

I’d gotten quite adept at this when I finally met Jamie. My process was almost a science when I met her. Almost. I had this nagging feeling that I was missing something, but I couldn’t place it for the life of me. I consider myself very fortunate that I met Jamie then. I started feeling the bone-tired, listless feeling that I’m currently experiencing right as she was turning up. She was a park ranger when I met her, sun-bitten skin and knives in her eyes. My team had just found one of my charges. The lost girl was… absolutely divine, if I’m honest. I had to hook my foot under a tree root to keep myself from getting up in her face and drowning myself in the look in her eyes. When I managed to tear myself away, the ranger was seething at me from across the way, a barely contained snarl boiling under her skin.

Now that caught my attention. No one had ever paid me any mind before, other than to congratulate me on helping to find another person. Yet here was this woman who, for all I could tell, absolutely despised me. I thought that maybe she knew what I’d been doing. Why else would she be so angry? So I kept my distance from her, from my Jamie.

It went on like this for several more individuals. Each time I saw her near one of my chosen people, the person in question was so much more terrified than I remembered, and was usually in less than one piece. The physical state they were in didn’t really matter to me. It was that more intense wave of fear that always had me hooked. I think she noticed too. Whatever she had been doing before she noticed me, I think it was better when I was involved. She always looked kind of annoyed that S&R was there, but over time she moved closer and closer to me. Eventually we were close enough that our hands brushed. There wasn’t a spark, just a slip of paper passed from her to me. A phone number. She smiled once to me, a smile with too many teeth and too-red gums. At my feet, dappled sunlight on the forest floor moved in impossible patterns, just for a moment, as she turned her back on me and refocused on the S&R individual.

I have to say, her smile always made my heart flutter.

I called her later that night. I planned on leading her in circles, cornering her in an answer about what she had been doing and why, but she tore through that plan in an instant. She dove in with her full name, Jamie Gates, said she killed people for the thrill of it, and demanded to know why I didn’t finish off the victims I stole from her. I was aghast at this. I led people around and confused the daylights out of them, but I’d never killed anyone, at least not on purpose. There was a long pause as she considered this. She asked why I would torment people like that without even finishing the job, that there was not point in sowing a crop if I didn’t harvest it.

At that point I considered just hanging up the phone. This woman was obviously crazy, admitting to killing people like that. From her tone I didn’t doubt her for a second, either. Still, after thinking it over for a moment, I wasn’t sure I was any better. Sure, my victims lived to see another day, but they were never the same. Then there was the fact that whatever Jamie did, it made my victims all the more delightful when I saw them for the final time. More than anything else, I wanted that to continue.

Finally, after a too-uncomfortable silence, I took a deep breath and told her that I did it because the feeling I got from seeing their confusion and hopelessness was unlike anything else. That I saw it once on accident and hadn’t looked back since.

She laughed once, a sharp, merciless thing, and said she thought she was the cruel one. I was about to snap at her when she added that she felt the same way. She had led a man into the forest after he had been bugging her for a private tour of the park. The intention had only been to scare him a little, rough him up around the edges and let out a little of the built up frustration from dealing with rude customers. Instead, she ended up stabbing him thirty-eight times. A unplanned act of malevolence she didn’t know she was capable of. She knew she should have been horrified. She should have been scared of being caught. But all she could focus on was how he became more and more scared of her with each blow. How fulfilled she felt.

She kept doing it with similar people. Some entitled asshole would ask for a private tour, and she’d agree. It always ended in the same intimate fashion. Recently, however, she started getting pulled away from her tourists. The forest would change around her, and all of a sudden she’d be in a place without her newest companion. Stranger than this, she’d been finding people in the woods already terrified, as if she had accompanied them for several days, despite never encountering them before. She began to think she was finally losing it. Then she met me. She said my swaying as I watched her freshly escaped victim was a dead giveaway. She laughed as she said that, and I like to think there was some affection in the sound, like how a blade sings to a whetstone.

All in all, her efficiency was impressive. I hadn’t thought anyone else was out there with me, and yet she’d been working in tandem with me for a while, apparently. I complimented her on the obvious skill she possessed, and she positively rumbled with delight over the phone. She admitted I wasn’t half bad either.  
It felt like the conversation was coming to a close. Panic started rising in my throat. Even though I’d been so worried over her killing people, she still sounded like fun. I liked her laugh, I liked how she wasn’t afraid to drive to the heart of things. What’s more, I liked how she was probably the only person who understood why I was doing what I was doing.

“Hey, uh, before you go, I think, I mean I’d like, I mean I think we should try working together, sometime,” I offered, my voice more unsteady than I meant it to be. My ears burned with how ham-fisted the delivery was, but I still don’t regret saying it.  
“That doesn’t strike me as your style,” she teased. It really was just her having a laugh at my expense, though. We both already knew we were eager to give it a go.

Our plan was simple. Jamie lured out whatever asshole or too-curious naive sucker out into the woods for a one on one, intensive hiking experience. Once they were good and separated from the rest of society, she started performing small acts of violence. Raising her voice when they were too slow. Kicking them back down rather than helping them back up. “Accidentally” going too quickly and causing them to twist their ankle. It all culminated in a deciding blow. Something unforgivable, like a knife in their shoulder or snapping their arm in half.

She left them to cry it out after that, and that’s when I came into the picture, all sympathy and shock. They were all so grateful for me. At first. I led them on my own tour, just as I did for the S&R lost causes. Once they stopped being able to distinguish what was real and what wasn’t, Jamie came back, knives in her hands and her smile. “You didn’t think I’d just leave you here, did you?” was one of her favorite lines she’d say as she watch them bleed out. I stood behind her, draped over her shoulder and smiling serenely.

It worked devastatingly well every time. We got drunk off the fears of the dying too many times to count, and got far more out of it than either of us could’ve accomplished alone. These carefully planned adventures were the best times in my life. I can’t bring myself to regret them. Maybe that’s selfish. Jamie’s gone now. I really do feel like that’s partly my fault, engaging with her like I did.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

The beginning of the end started with spiders. At least, that’s what Jamie said. When she started noticing the spiders, that’s when everything started going wrong. We were so meticulous in our planning, so careful in who we chose and when we chose to do it, that we didn’t think any person could stand a chance against us. I guess that was part of the problem.

Jamie came over to my place after a very successful escapade. She kept throwing glances over her shoulder and jumping at the smallest sound. We had an agreement that we should never meet outside the forest, so the fact that she had come over despite this and the condition she was in immediately led me to believe that we had been found out. I invited her in, of course. If we were going to be taken away, it was best we be taken away together.

Nothing came after us that night. Or the next night. Or the one after that. Or the nights in the subsequent two weeks. I believed she was terrified of something, but there was nothing to convince me that whatever she was terrified of was really out there. To be honest, I started to get worried that Jamie had begun to develop a conscience about our prior actions.

The only time I ever saw her cry was when I confronted her over this, half-shouting that if she wanted to back out, all she had to do was say so and I’d leave her be. God, I couldn’t even look her in the eyes while saying it. I expected her to snap back. She always snapped or snarled when given the opportunity. Not this time. She just, collapsed onto a chair, sobbing. Crying that there was nothing on earth that could make her want to leave me. That she was terrified she was going to end up without me anyways. That she knew something was following her and she was powerless to do anything about it.

All I could do was hold her as she shook, stunned at this. She felt everything intensely, but I never knew her to be afraid. Angry, yes. Frustrated, yes. But not afraid. My Jamie was never afraid.

Our outings became less frequent, and she was over at my place more often. Being alone or being with strange people, even if they were prey, made her exceptionally nervous. I didn’t know what I could do other than provide concern and watch. Jamie, once the rock I anchored myself to, was now sand slipping between my fingers. Nothing was out to get us. We were as close as ever. But every day I felt like we were being pulled apart, like a wall was being built between us no matter how frantically we tried to tear it.

I wish I could tell you what happened to her. I wish I knew the chain of events that led to her disappearing. I don’t, though. I have no idea. Despite watching her closely for weeks, despite spending every moment with her I could, I have nothing to go on except a single statement from her. “There’s something in the city. Something’s waiting there for me. It’s trying to pull me in. You can’t let it. Please, don’t let me get pulled in there.” Whatever’s here, it must’ve gotten her by now. I can’t help but feel like it’s my fault she’s gone. She was there one day and then the next I couldn’t find a trace of her. She asked me to help her and I could do nothing. The first day I didn’t hear anything from her I knew she was gone, and the world stopped turning.

I’ve looked for Jamie for months now. I’m not sure how efficient I am at it currently. The effect that used to happen for others when I led them around in the woods are now happening to me. I can’t bring myself to sleep, I keep ending up in places I’m sure I was walking away from, and I swear people on magazine covers are laughing at me. I feel so empty all the time. There’s this gut feeling that if I went back to the forest for a few days and led someone around, I’d feel better, but I can’t. Not without her. I can’t abandon her in this awful city. I know for a fact that, if I leave, I’ll never find her. Still, I can’t help but feel like something, or someone, is trying it’s best to keep me from finding her. And I know it’s winning. But I can’t leave her here. So I struggle and I struggle and I struggle and I am almost certain I’m dying in this place, but I can’t leave. I can’t leave.

Please send me news of her as soon as you can.

  
_“Statement ends. We might have a statement on Jamie, but I’m not entirely sure I’m ‘obligated’ to send it to Ms. Abelson. Still, a fresh statement on two budding avatars _was_ rather… satisfying. If I can find a statement I might see about asking her to pay the Institute a visit in person._

_On a more… human note, hearing about their friendship was a nice reprieve from the current state of the Archives. It’s, comforting. _  
_ I wonder what Martin would think… End recording."_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really used to writing statements, and this is the first thing I've written in a long time. I'm more used to writing dialogue and character perspective and, well, statements don't have a lot of that, but I wanted to try my hand at it. So thanks for sticking with me to get this far.
> 
> Also Jonathan Sims doesn't know what romantic interest looks like, you cannot change my mind.


End file.
